The Everything Writing Poetry Book (24 page)

Actions

Closely related to the tool of appearance is that of action. To give the reader an even better picture of the loved one you are describing, show this person limping up a staircase, peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink, dancing in the family room, or shoveling the driveway. The description of a father's hands in the last section shows those hands in action, as well as in physical detail. Action and appearance should work together to show (and not tell) your reader about the person you are concentrating on. When you allow your readers to form impressions for themselves, you are adding to the pleasure they gain from reading your poems.

Having the tool of action at your disposal gives you an advantage over a painter. As a writer you can describe both the physical and emotional aspects of a person. To do this, you must remember the discussion in Chapter 3 about active verbs and active voice. Passive voice and linking verbs should be avoided in this case. You want the subject of your poem to jump out at the reader, almost as if she were watching a play or a movie.

Dialogue

Another tool you have for re-creating your relatives—one also not available to the painter—is
speech
. What a person says can reveal just as much as what a person wears or how a person acts. For example, if you have a relative who uses a lot of profanity, your readers will get a very strong impression of that person through the dialogue you include. Likewise, if you can accurately portray a person's accent to your reader, this may serve as a hint about the subject's heritage.

Using social, regional, and stylistic variation to capture the speech patterns of your relatives is a great tactic. An uncle who says “I ain't got” rather than “I don't have” has a certain social and educational background. A cousin who exclaims “Lord have mercy!” and “Bless his heart!” will very likely be associated with a particular region, culture, or age group. If one sibling speaks using only single words and another elaborates with clause after clause, the reader will get a very distinct, contrasting impression based solely on their stylistic differences.

Thoughts

One last tool available to you—and another that is not available to the painter—is thought. You can bring your reader into the minds of the people in your poems. To do this well, you must follow the same guidelines that fiction writers use when they create point of view. Early in your poem, you must establish a speaker—the voice through which a reader experiences the poem—and you must establish exactly how much information that speaker can reveal to the reader.

For example, if you begin the poem with the pronoun
I
, readers assume that the speaker is talking about herself. In most cases, this speaker will not be able to reveal the thoughts and the feelings of other characters. She can make guesses about them, based upon the surface details of appearance, action, and speech, but the speaker won't know definitively. The speaker will, however, be able to tell a reader what she is thinking or feeling. The monologue, discussed in Chapter 7, is a common method for such a speaker.

Here Comes the Bride

What is a better time to write about loved ones than after an event that has brought them together? Marriage is an experience that drastically changes one's life and one's lifestyle. While the couple getting married is obviously the most affected by such an occasion, the families and friends who attend a wedding are affected as well. With so many details and people included, the circumstances surrounding a wedding, or the event itself, can be a great subject for poetry.

A Traditional Approach

The traditional wedding poem, called an
epithalamion
, tends to be very long—possibly hundreds of lines. It also tends to be formal in tone, praising the bride and the groom and passing along the good wishes of the speaker in ornate language. The following portion of an epithalamion written by John Donne will give you a sense of the traditional form:

Hail Bishop Valentine, whose day this is;
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners
.

A Modern Method

Joseph Millar presents a modern take on the marriage poem in “Dark Harvest.” The poem sings praise but also includes a more solemn facet—the troubled pasts of both the speaker and the person he addresses. Consider the following selection from this poem:

You can come to me in the evening,
    with the fingers of former lovers
fastened in your hair and their ghost lips
    opening over your body.
They can be philosophers or musicians in long coats and colored shoes
and they can be smarter than I am,
    whispering to each other
        when they look at us.
You can come walking toward my window after dusk
    when I can't see past the lamplight in the glass,
when the chipped plates rattle on the counter
    and the cinders
dance on the cross-ties under the wheels of southbound freights.
Bring children if you want, and the long wounds of sisters
    branching away
        behind you toward the sea.
Bring your mother's tense distracted face
        and the shoulders of plane mechanics
slumped in the Naugahyde booths of the airport diner,
    waiting for you to bring their eggs
.

I'll bring all the bottles of gin I drank by myself
    and my cracked mouth opened partway
as I slept in the back of my blue Impala
                dreaming of spiders
.

From
Overtime.
Reprinted with the permissions of the publisher, Eastern Washington University Press (Spokane, Washington), and the author
.

The traditional epithalamion is written in praise of someone. However, you can choose a different approach, as Millar does, and write your own distinct marriage poem. Praise your spouse, discuss your fears, illustrate your fulfillment, or express your worry about the future. People have all kinds of different feelings about marriage, and a poem is the perfect place to express yours without restriction.

And Baby Makes Three

Everyone has a different definition for a family. Some people consider friends a part of their families. Others treat their cats or dogs like siblings or children. And many people adopt children to start their families or broaden them. Traditionally, though, a family begins with the birth of children. A marriage marks the start of a joint life between two people, but the addition of children is often thought to complete a family.

If you are a father, you may have had the opportunity to see your baby enter the world or to deliver her yourself. This is an experience unlike any other, and a great subject for poetry. If you are a mother, these feelings are probably even stronger. You have carried your child for nine months. You have watched your body change to accommodate the life growing within you. Finally, you struggle for hours to bring your baby into the world. The emotions surrounding childbirth are overwhelming and provide a great inspiration for poetry.

Such emotions can be captured in poems, but chances are, you were so caught up in the moment itself that you forgot to remember details for later use. Do your best to recall the color of the bed sheets in the delivery room, the smell of the hospital, and the sounds of the machines around you. If you have a more unique situation, like adopting a child from another country or from a family member, work to recall the flight attendant on your plane as you traveled to get your baby or the sound of the pen on the documents as your child was legally made yours. These concrete details, in conjunction with your strong emotions, will create a realistic environment for your poem.

As an accompaniment to the list you make about the details of the birth, you can set down any worries and resentments you may feel. Hopefully, this list won't be long. However, it will give you the means to add complexity to your poem. A contrast of joys and worries, or a poem focusing on the uncertainties posed by future decisions, might be the result. Ask yourself important questions. What changed about the relationship between you and your partner when the baby arrived? How has having this first child affected your ideas about having more children? How do you envision your future now that you have a family?

Dealing with Divorce

Unfortunately statistics show that about half of the marriages in the United States end in divorce. Like marriage and childbirth, divorce can create a great deal of change in your life. It might translate into the absence of family members, the acquisition of new roles, and even a relocation to a new place. Poetry will allow you to explore this new territory and express your feelings, both good and bad.

The Dark Side

Harsh feelings such as anger, resentment, bitterness, and inadequacy can accompany you through divorce proceedings and beyond. Very likely, these feelings surround the spouse that you have just left. Exploring these feelings in a journal or a series of free-writing exercises is the best way to prepare material for poems. Document your feelings, but also try to recall specific events that triggered these responses. For example, perhaps you were angriest with your spouse on the day she forgot to pick up the children from school. Or maybe you found yourself at the end of your rope the last time he made a mean comment about your appearance.

If you and your spouse have children, the situation will automatically become more complicated. They will feel confused and hurt, just as you will, but they will have more difficulty dealing with the situation. In your journals, it might be interesting to try writing about the divorce from the children's perspective. What is the most troubling thing about the divorce for them? What questions do they want answered? How are they choosing to deal with their feelings? Considering these questions will not only improve your poetry, but it will also help you do the best thing for your children.

A New Beginning

While divorce can be a complicated and upsetting mess, sometimes the event is needed and even welcomed by both members of a couple. If both people were unhappy in the marriage, maybe divorce is a necessary step toward finding happiness. If you are in an abusive relationship, divorce might be the one thing that can make you feel safe and comfortable again. So, divorce involves positives that you can explore just as deeply as the negatives. What are the benefits of the divorce? What are your prospects now you're on your own again? Consider these questions to find the silver lining of your situation.

And again, don't forget the details. Perhaps the day after your divorce you got your first full night's sleep in six months. Or maybe that menacing nauseous feeling in your stomach finally left for good. Did color return to your complexion and a smile to your face? Record these aspects in vivid detail and be sure to include them in your poetry.

Holidays

Holidays may be the only times that you see some of your friends and relatives. Because reunions are generally infrequent, occasions spent with family can also be awkward or uncomfortable. But seeing these people again can remind you how far your family extends and how many different lives it connects. You may have the chance to learn something new about your family at every meeting. Treasure these family legacies and stories, as they are also a part of your life and heritage.

A Time for Reflection

In the following poem by Jeff Knorr, “Winter Turkeys,” the speaker relates his memories of his own family gatherings. The speaker is also documenting recollections made by his father—bits of stories that reconstruct the earlier times of the family.

There have been thirty-six turkeys
in my life, each near Christmas.
Two I have missed, in '86 and '88
and also missed the death of my father's mother.
That year in Vienna, I phoned
from a bar serving schnitzel. Then outside
the pale evening, as if a far off fire
heaved itself into the apricot dusk
.

We eat well at these dinners: stuffings,
mulled berries, roasted turkey, many wines.
Our mother is getting so she shakes a bit
lifting the black, fat-spitting roaster.
Our father carves still with respectful
movements to the bird, feeling its curves
into neat slices of meat. This year he might
talk about the old Murray cabin up the road.
But that's as passing as the morning quail.
Instead he's telling me of a cousin he hasn't seen
since his mother's funeral. And this word
hangs, the
f
sticking on his lip
like the clot of fat and blood he wipes from the knife.
I nod, stand stupidly as a cow
.

Later I'll leave him alone, jacket and brandy,
his half a snifter on the back deck.
He'll look a long way off into the sky and find
the railroad camps near Shasta,
our sister's ballet debut,
his first night with our mother cruising San Jose.
They tail like glowing meteors over the ridge.
In the morning we'll walk shoulder to shoulder
quietly through new snow
as though the stars had fallen to ashes overnight
.